Monday, July 13, 2015

It’s not just that the chicken littles are running around
screaming that the sky is falling. They are also claiming that their views
are scientific fact and that anyone who disagrees is a “denier,” akin to a
Holocaust denier. That means, needing to be cast out of human community into
the outer darkness.

In a time when a battalion of atheists is proclaiming a
great victory over religion, global warmists have enlisted science in their
efforts to remake the world economy.
They insist that science has told them that global warming is going to
produce a world-wide apocalypse, destroying the planet and perhaps even nature
itself.

If you refuse to accept these truths, you will be shunned
and ostracized, expelled from polite company. If you are a scientist who
depends on funding from the government or foundations or universities your
career will go up in smoke.

As I have occasionally noted, the scientists who have stood
up against the global warming cult are simply beyond its reach. In many cases
they are retired, like Nobel prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever and former
head of climate science at MIT, Richard Lindzen.

But others are fighting the good fight, against the prophets
of climate apocalypse and against those who would render science a handmaiden
of gross superstition.

In a long and detailed essay Matt Ridley explains how science
can be corrupted by bad data, bad analysis and bad conclusions. Once an error
becomes elevated to the status of scientific fact, debate and discussion are
shut down.

What passes as climate science is part of it, but it is not the
only part.

Ridley writes:

It
turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by
myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas….

The
theory that dietary fat causes obesity and heart disease, based on a couple of
terrible studies in the 1950s, became unchallenged orthodoxy and is only now
fading slowly….

Nina
Teicholz’s book The Big Fat Surprise shows
in devastating detail how opponents of Ancel Keys’s dietary fat hypothesis were
starved of grants and frozen out of the debate by an intolerant consensus
backed by vested interests, echoed and amplified by a docile press.

Ridley takes a measured position on the influence of
greenhouse gasses on climate change:

The
“bad idea” in this case is not that climate changes, nor that human beings
influence climate change; but that the impending change is sufficiently
dangerous to require urgent policy responses. In the 1970s, when global
temperatures were cooling, some scientists could not resist the lure of press
attention by arguing that a new ice age was imminent. Others called this
nonsense and the World Meteorological Organisation rightly refused to endorse
the alarm. That’s science working as it should.

But, those whose rational faculties are being led by their
emotions (and their lust for fame and fortune) have sounded an increasingly shrill alarm:

Since
then, however, inch by inch, the huge green pressure groups have grown fat on a
diet of constant but ever-changing alarm about the future. That these
alarms—over population growth, pesticides, rain forests, acid rain, ozone
holes, sperm counts, genetically modified crops—have often proved wildly
exaggerated does not matter: the organisations that did the most exaggeration
trousered the most money. In the case of climate, the alarm is always in the
distant future, so can never be debunked.

As often happens, one need but follow the money. Too many
people have too much at stake to admit to being wrong:

These
huge green multinationals, with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars,
have now systematically infiltrated science, as well as industry and media,
with the result that many high-profile climate scientists and the journalists
who cover them have become one-sided cheerleaders for alarm, while a hit squad
of increasingly vicious bloggers polices the debate to ensure that anybody who
steps out of line is punished. They insist on stamping out all mention of the
heresy that climate change might not be lethally dangerous.

Why is it not science? Because the conclusions precede the
facts and determine which facts are acceptable. Only the facts that affirm the pre-conception are admitted:

Today’s
climate science, as Ian Plimer points out in his chapter in The Facts, is based on a
“pre-ordained conclusion, huge bodies of evidence are ignored and analytical
procedures are treated as evidence”. Funds are not available to investigate
alternative theories. Those who express even the mildest doubts about dangerous
climate change are ostracised, accused of being in the pay of fossil-fuel
interests or starved of funds; those who take money from green pressure groups
and make wildly exaggerated statements are showered with rewards and treated by
the media as neutral.

Since much of today’s global warmism involves predictions
about the future—aka prophecies—I have occasionally quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
statement that, by definition, there is no such thing as a scientific fact
about the future.

Ridley raises the same point:

Scientists
are terrible at making forecasts—indeed as Dan Gardner documents in his book Future
Babble they are often worse than laymen. And the climate is a
chaotic system with multiple influences of which human emissions are just one,
which makes prediction even harder.

And, like other pseudoscientific projects—e.g.
psychoanalysis— global warmism has become a pseudoreligion:

Following
what the psychologist Philip Tetlock called the “psychology of taboo”, there
has been a systematic and thorough campaign to rule out the middle ground as
heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken, immoral and beyond the pale. That’s
what the word denier with its deliberate connotations of Holocaust denial is
intended to do. For reasons I do not fully understand, journalists have been
shamefully happy to go along with this fundamentally religious project.

And he adds:

Excusing
failed predictions is a staple of astrology; it’s the way pseudoscientists
argue. In science, as Karl Popper long ago insisted, if you make predictions
and they fail, you don’t just make excuses and insist you’re even more right
than before….

The
great Thomas Henry Huxley put it this way: “The improver of natural knowledge
absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is
the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.” Richard Feynman
was even pithier: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

Take President Obama’s statement, to the effect that 97% of
scientists believe in the dangers of man-made climate change.

Ridley debunks it easily:

Barack
Obama says that 97 per cent of scientists agree that climate change is “real,
man-made and dangerous”. That’s just a lie (or a very ignorant remark): as I
point out above, there is no consensus that it’s dangerous.

… The
97 per cent figure is derived from two pieces of pseudoscience that would have
embarrassed a homeopath. The first was a poll that found that 97 per cent of
just seventy-nine scientists thought climate change was man-made—not that it
was dangerous. A more recent poll of 1854 members of the American
Meteorological Society found the true number is 52 per cent.

The
second source of the 97 per cent number was a survey of scientific papers,
which has now been comprehensively demolished by Professor Richard Tol of Sussex
University, who is probably the world’s leading climate economist. As the
Australian blogger
Joanne Nova summarised Tol’s findings, John Cook of the University of
Queensland and his team used an unrepresentative sample, left out much useful
data, used biased observers who disagreed with the authors of the papers they
were classifying nearly two-thirds of the time, and collected and analysed the
data in such a way as to allow the authors to adjust their preliminary
conclusions as they went along, a scientific no-no if ever there was one.

According to Joanne
Nova, the delirium about climate change is based on an unproven assumption:

In her
chapter in The Facts, Nova
points out that the entire trillion-dollar industry of climate change policy
rests on a single hypothetical assumption, first advanced in 1896, for which to
this day there is no evidence.

The
assumption is that modest warming from carbon dioxide must be trebly amplified
by extra water vapour—that as the air warms there will be an increase in
absolute humidity providing “a positive feedback”. That assumption led to
specific predictions that could be tested. And the tests come back negative
again and again. The large positive feedback that can turn a mild warming into
a dangerous one just is not there. There is no tropical troposphere hot-spot.
Ice cores unambiguously show that temperature can fall while carbon dioxide
stays high. Estimates of climate sensitivity, which should be high if positive
feedbacks are strong, are instead getting lower and lower. Above all, the
temperature has failed to rise as predicted by the models.

Giving credit where credit is due, Ridley notes that many of
the bloggers who are offering the most cogent critiques of climate
pseudoscience are women:

And of
course there was the mother of
all scandals, the “hockey stick” itself: a graph that purported to show the
warming of the last three decades of the twentieth century as unprecedented in
a millennium, a graph that the IPCC was so thrilled with that it published it
six times in its third assessment report and displayed it behind the IPCC
chairman at his press conference.

Its
hockey-stick shape depended heavily on one set of data from bristlecone pine
trees in the American south-west, enhanced by a statistical approach to
over-emphasise some 200 times any hockey-stick shaped graph. Yet bristlecone
tree-rings do not, according to those who collected the data, reflect
temperature at all. What is more, the scientist behind the original paper,
Michael Mann, had known all along that his data depended heavily on these
inappropriate trees and a few other series, because when finally prevailed upon
to release his data he accidentally included a file called “censored” that
proved as much: he had tested the effect of removing the bristlecone pine
series and one other, and found that the hockey-stick shape disappeared.

Of course, the issue goes well beyond science. Global
warming alarmists want to institute massive policy changes. They want,
effectively, to repeal the Industrial Revolution. Since they believe that the
sky is falling, and that the planet, even nature itself, will soon be
extinguished, they refuse to consider the effects of their policy
prescriptions.

Ridley explains:

The big
difference is that these scientists who insist that we take their word for it,
and who get cross if we don’t, are also asking us to make huge, expensive and
risky changes to the world economy and to people’s livelihoods. They want us to
spend a fortune getting emissions down as soon as possible. And they want us to
do that even if it hurts poor people today, because, they say, their
grandchildren (who, as Nigel Lawson points out, in The Facts, and their models assume, are going to be very
wealthy) matter more.

Yet
they are not prepared to debate the science behind their concern. That seems
wrong to me.

11 comments:

Do some reading in the Greens -- in all their permutations: social, political, scientific, spiritual, etc. -- and you'll get the full understanding about what this issue is about.

And after you do that, read up on postmodernism -- the intellectual propellant of the Green agenda. This is the idea that narrative trumps everything else (facts, evidence, analysis, etc.). Nothing else matters. That's how the President can echo "97%," and -- poof! -- it's true.

It's the narrative, stupid.

And it's making everyone stupid. The Leftist world is brought about by an assault on value. It's about destroying standards to usher in the Empire of Nice, which is the intervening period to subjective totalitarianism, when "the narrative" leads to the consolidation political power. It is the same Progressivism that favored fascism in the first half of the 20th century, and then dressed it up to look nice. This is the process of forming conclusions emotionally and getting the facts later. It is subjective vision packaged as objective truth.

It's about self-congratulatory nonsense like "We are the ones we've been waiting for."

It's about personal absolution from sin by pointing the finger "out there" and saying "Mean people suck."

It's about a corporate motto like "Don't be evil" as a prophylactic for the conscience of the employee participant.

It's the willful disbelief in "Hope and Change."

It's about the inane fanfare of selecting the only known place hospitable to life as "Planet of the Year."

Postmodernism is a cancer that is destroying our institutions, in all realms. Yes, even science.

Postmodernism is a pseudo-intellectual framework that preys on, infects and survives on the worst dimensions of human nature, and thrives by exalting said dimensions as "the truth" about is all. It does not call the human person to be everything he/she is capable of. It invites the human person to engage in all forms of pleasure because that's all we are: filth. We are material creatures, responding in behavioralist ways. We are machines.

The postmodern vision serves as the antidote to Christian humanism, and is more numbing and addictive than anything we've ever seen because it rationalizes and justifies every base desire we have. It dispatches conscience. We get to feel good about feeling good, individually and collectively. Because it is constructed as subjective fiction, and will not acknowledge objective truths about the human person, it requires totalitarian measures to subdue the human will and maintain power.

There's nothing more gratifying for the postmodern than pseudo-activist than standing for Climate Change. What are you, against THE EARTH???

The Green movement is a collection of decadent freethinkers with artificially-elevated influence who have designed their own fantasy world as a utopian vision. Until we realize this, and go on the offensive, we will continue to lose the battle of ideas. Andrew Breitbart was one of the few people who truly understood this.

re: As I have occasionally noted, the scientists who have stood up against the global warming cult are simply beyond its reach. In many cases they are retired, like Nobel prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever and former head of climate science at MIT, Richard Lindzen. But others are fighting the good fight, against the prophets of climate apocalypse and against those who would render science a handmaiden of gross superstition.

Its curious to be able to simple "know" which side the "good fight" is on.

Such pronouncements seem to be about "assuming your conclusions" and listening to anyone who offers opinions that support it.

And Matt Ridley's long-winded attempt to show the perils of possibly over-hyped predictions of future warming while clearly having his own biases and misrepresenations.

Coincidentally science-journalist and Video blogger Potholer54 offered a new video about scientific consensus process. Perhaps he's a little too trusting of the scientific process, but he's correct at least that contrarians should work their counter-cases through the peer review process, although I suppose the problem is most are not qualified to do so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTJQPyTVtNA Scientific consensus and arguments from authority

I don't know how to keep politics out of science, or if we can afford to keep science out of politics. If science is always provisional, then its conclusions can never be used for political authority.

Ideally science is done in controlled experiments, in the laboratory, and repeated by many unsympathetic experimenters, and then you know what you know. But since we only have one earth, and one future, science would seem to not be very useful, at least on slow and irreversible experiments like CO2 that takes thousands of years to be chemically removed from the atmosphere. By the time you're sure the "sky is falling" its because the sky has already fallen, or its too late to do anything about it.

Environmentalists sometimes talk of the "the 7th generation principle" which sounds good in theory, but in practice, it just means saying no to almost everything that has the possibility of encouraging 7-9 billion people from surviving on earth.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation_sustainability

"But since we only have one earth, and one future, science would seem to not be very useful, at least on slow and irreversible experiments like CO2 that takes thousands of years to be chemically removed from the atmosphere. By the time you're sure the 'sky is falling' its because the sky has already fallen, or its too late to do anything about it."

This from Ares Olympus, the guy who loves to talk ad infinitum, scourging others about "strawmen." Yes, from this Olympian high above the clouds, we have circular, self-referential thinking about inevitable changes in our climate...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

...or proof by assertion, or proof by repetition, or many other fallacies...

re: Of course, the issue goes well beyond science. Global warming alarmists want to institute massive policy changes. They want, effectively, to repeal the Industrial Revolution. Since they believe that the sky is falling, and that the planet, even nature itself, will soon be extinguished, they refuse to consider the effects of their policy prescriptions.

What's interesting is "the sky is falling" argument works both ways. If there is needed action or inaction where both sides have high potential costs, then who do you believe?

If some "believe" modern civilization can't survive without fossil fuels, and some "believe" modern civilization can't survive without stopping the burning of fossil fuels, we have TWO competing beliefs, one of them is say 300 years old (the industrial revolution) and one is modern (100 years of climate observations).

So it migh SEEMS like the climate change proponents are the bullies, but you might also consider fossil fuels as the real bully, or the "dinosaur" whom we'll someday no longer be able to feed for any number of reasons.

So apparently its beliefs all the way down, unless science can break us out somehow and tell us the truth.

The blog from yesterday was "Addiction vs. Willpower", but to even start that debate you have to admit there is a problem. Willpower can't solve a problem when you refuse to imagine the possiility there's a problem.

So the climate change proponents are suggesting we need willpower, while the deniers are refusing to imagine the addiction even exists, or if it does exist it must be good for us, like very Siren Song tells us until the final moment.

The declining cost of solar electricity is because of (a) cheap panels coming out of China using cheap labor; and (b) massive government subsidies. If solar were so great, there would be a booming domestic industry that didn't rely on Democratic Party donations as the core of its marketing plan.

The cost of fossil fuels is declining. For now. But don't expect it to go up anytime soon... Saudi Arabia is going to need a lot of cash on hand to build their nuclear deterrent to check Iran's.

The economic profession has never known how to account for free will, and imagines an ability to predict this rational actor seeking to fulfill his own self-interest. The human person is an emotional being first, and there are no reliable predictors of human emotion. We will always be in the dark. Indeed you are correct... human actions are chaotic and wants insatiable.

Two year old should not be subsidized! Let them compete with 20 year olds!

Clean energy technologies should not be subsidized! Let them compete with dirty technology which society subsidized in the past!

Free market ideology is utter nonsense when recognize that technologies are children of the human mind and political-economic power struggles. There would not be finance for new technologies in a system of perfect competition unless the subsidy for R&D is built into the markup price of all the firms that sell goods and subsidize R&D.